Channels

Services

CrowdRE: collaborative reverse engineering

A new project called CrowdRE aims to make it easier for developers to reverse engineer complex applications by working collaboratively with other users. Normally, the process of reverse engineering complicated software from a binary format can be very time consuming; CrowdRE hopes to speed this process up through team work.

CrowdRE, which is currently considered to be at an "alpha" stage of development, is available as a plugin for the popular IDA Pro disassembler and debugger application. With the plugin, a group of developers can reverse engineer one or more functions of an analysed binary and upload them to a cloud-based server which keeps track of them all in a central database. This allows clients to benefit from work that other developers have already completed and share any progress that they make with the rest of the community. The database is searchable and each function can have different concurring commits.

CrowdRE allows users to search for and import other users' contributions
Source: CrowdStrike

The tool is being developed by a security startup called CrowdStrike and is provided free of charge. Georg Wicherski, CrowdStrike Senior Security Researcher, says that the company's goal is "to help build a public database of known, well annotated functions to speed up the analysis of standard components," adding, "We will also support list-based commit visibility to give users control over who else can see and import their contributions".

In the coming days, the developers plan to publish a series of how-to posts including videos on the official CrowdStrike blog in order to explain different use cases of CrowdRE. As CrowdRE uses Google's Authentication Service, a Google Account is required for registration.